Greetings unto the populace!
As we move back into a more open time, with more opportunities to gather for events, I want to share a couple of new opportunities to help event stewards plan. While the new rules allow for events to be held without requiring preregistration, Society rules now allow for a couple of electronic methods for accepting credit cards for payment.
Starting with Crown Tournament, we have been testing how PayPal will work for event preregistration. Society rules and our Kingdom PayPal policy require that each registrant contact my PayPal Deputy, Marian Elizabeth Wollenschlager, who will then have PayPal issue them an invoice which they can pay by credit card or from their PayPal account. Obviously, this is a clunky process, but as I said, it came to us from Society. Fortunately, the event steward for Crown, Duchess Mary of Carrigart, created a Google form that fed to a Google sheet which Marian could access. All a person needed to do was fill in the form and submit it, which added their name and information to the sheet, and the invoice could be sent. Marian will work with groups to help them create the necessary form if they will contact her by email at paypal@northshield.org. As I said a couple of months ago, Marian’s commitment to serve will end soon, so I’m hoping someone will step up to help with PayPal. You can find the job description on the Kingdom website under Officers->Help Wanted. If you’re interested in discussing the job, you can contact Marian or me at exchequer@northshield.org.
Another form of online registration that we hope will be coming soon is the SCA Registration System (SCARS). When we can make use of this, event stewards will be able to submit the information about their event – dates, registration costs, family caps, feast and/or lunch costs, maximum numbers at a meal, etc., and an event sign-up will be available on the SCA.org website. You log in like you do to pay for membership (nonmembers can create a login now), click on events, find our Kingdom’s list, pick the event you want to attend, register, and pay with a credit card or PayPal. There will be a small fee for the event to use the service, and each transaction is charged a fee, just as with PayPal. The Society Exchequer will forward any funds collected, less any fees, to the local group Exchequer.
When can we make use of that? Well, first, we need to create a SCARS policy, which requires approval by the BOD. We will need to identify a SCARS deputy who will collect the information for events, enter it into the system, and generate reports for the local groups. This person needs to be comfortable working with web forms (not creating them, just entering data, and documenting any errors if they occur). The Stallari Council is working on both the policy and a job description, which should be ready for review by the BOD by the time this missive comes to print.
I look forward to working with groups to help make the events more accessible!
Yours in Service to the Dream,
Bayard